War & Peace Quote by Anthony Hope

A neat little epitaph with a rapier hidden inside it, "His foe was folly and his weapon wit" frames a life as a duel: not against villains or armies, but against stupidity, pretension, and self-seriousness. Hope, a novelist best known for The Prisoner of Zenda, understood that in certain social worlds the sharpest conflicts aren’t physical at all. They play out in drawing rooms, courtly rituals, and public performance, where “folly” isn’t innocent silliness but a kind of moral and civic hazard: bad judgment dressed up as tradition, vanity mistaken for honor.

The line’s elegance is its subtext. By casting folly as an “foe,” Hope personifies irrationality as something organized and aggressive, always advancing. By naming “wit” as the “weapon,” he elevates intelligence into action: wit isn’t mere cleverness, it’s a form of resistance. That matters in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture, when satire and social comedy served as acceptable ways to puncture hypocrisy without openly revolting against class order. Wit becomes the socially permitted blade.

There’s also an affectionate irony. Fighting folly with wit implies you’ll never run out of enemies; human life keeps supplying them. The hero here isn’t sanctified as noble in the grand sense, but as agile, observant, and unwilling to let nonsense pass unchallenged. It’s a compact manifesto for the writer’s job: if you can’t always change the system, you can at least make it blush.